Residents tour Somerset Station to hear about plans for future

Friday

Jul 27, 2012 at 12:01 AMJul 27, 2012 at 9:34 PM

As cranes tore down structures around the behemoth Somerset Station that housed one of the state’s most notorious power plant polluters in the state, residents and town officials who fought for years to shut it down toured the 90-year-old building on Thursday as plans develop to revise the waterfront.

Jo C. Goode

As cranes tore down structures around the behemoth Somerset Station that housed one of the state’s most notorious power plant polluters in the state, residents and town officials who fought for years to shut it down toured the 90-year-old building on Thursday as plans develop to revise the waterfront.

Demolition and remediation of the 21-acre site is set take 18 months to two years, said Robert Katz of the Asset Recovery Group, the company that purchased the property and an additional 17 acres across Riverside Avenue.

The company specializes in purchasing closed power plants for demolition and cleaning, then redeveloping the properties.

In the next 10 years, Katz said, about 100 coal-burning plants like Somerset Station will be taken off-line.

“A lot of communities are getting smart and want to get rid of the plants. Some of them have been closed for 30 to 60 years,” Katz said.

A $100 million project to redevelop the waterfront, proposed by attorney Jan Schlichtmann in partnership with Asset Recovery Group, was presented to residents later in the day. It comes after neighbors struggled for years to shut down the plant.

“I was here on a tour 30 years ago, when the power plant first switched to burning coal. It was supposed to be temporary,” said resident Connie Brodeur, a member of the local organization Coalition for Clean Air.

For most of his 78 years, Serafin Rodrigues has lived near the power plant. And for the past 40 years, he has worked to get it closed.

“We’ve been fighting this plant for years. I’m glad to see it come down,” he said.

A room as long as a football field, where giant turbines once churned out electricity, is nearly empty, save for a few gigantic metal structures. The metal and all other scrap on the property will be collected and sold.

Frank Weidner, a principal for Asset Recovery Group, is familiar with the power plant. He told guests it was constructed in three phases, the first in 1923, then in the 1940s and in the 1950s. Weinder said he’s been tearing down power plants for 38 years.

It’s the first time Schlichtmann has seen the interior of the power plant. He hopes to transform the brick shell of the plant into a state-of-the-art biomarine research and development center.

“My hope is to take this site that epitomized the 20th-century insight and hopefully turn it into a place that has a 21st-century insight into energy generation, where we’re not actually extracting but working with nature,” he said.